Hospital staff crisis sparks patient safety warnings

HEALTH inspectors have issued a damning report on a Dudley hospital after they found inadequate levels of nursing staff, incomplete records and deteriorating patients going ‘unnoticed’.

The shock report states that health officers witnessed a patient at Russells Hall Hospital taking medication without the knowledge of staff members.

Inspectors from the Care Quality Commission reported that the urgent care departments were mainly made up of agency staff, which made the teams ‘stressed’.

Concerns were raised that sepsis screening was not undertaken for all patients, with senior doctors claiming they “screened automatically ‘in their head’ for the deadly infection.”

The report stated: “Inspectors were not assured by the care given to deterio- rating patients. They saw two patients whose clinical deterioration had gone unnoticed, which had to be alerted to staff by the inspection team, who then acted on this immediately.”

The CQC visited the emergency department, the Immediate Medical Assessment Area and the short-stay A2 ward on March 15 after concerns relating to the death of a patient. The report found that nurse staffing was consistently not met in the Immediate Medical Assessment Area area, with just three in 36 days being fully staffed.

Diane Wake, Chief Executive at the Dudley Group NHS Foundation Trust, said: “We recognise the challenges that we have in our Emergency Department and are absolutely committed to delivering the actions we need to make to ensure patient safety.”